"I'm just making my daughter a cup of cocoa," Sorensen said scornfully, but Ramsey saw something anomalous in his body language. He had no idea what the major might be doing but he hoped the men in black weren't paying close attention. On the other hand, he hoped that Sorensen wasn't planning anything heroic—Doyle and Pilger were armed to the teeth, and even Sorensen's friend Captain Parkins, sitting stiffly in a chair in his uniform, scowling at the floor, was armed. It was Parkins who had arrested them in the first place, after all, and now they were cooling their heels waiting for General Yacoubian. That made it three large men with guns against himself and Sorensen, both unarmed, and a little girl who probably didn't even have the training wheels off her bike.

"Daddy," Christabel said suddenly, unable to pretend interest in the lioness that was chasing down a wildebeest for the fifth time through the loop, "when can we go home? I want to see Mommy."

"Soon, honey."

Sorensen still had his back to them, waiting for the water to boil, and Ramsey felt a shiver of unease. Doyle and Pilger might look like they were doing anything but performing their professional duty, but Ramsey had met their sort before, both on the military bases of his youth and in the cop bars in which he sometimes found himself in his adult profession. Not to mention that physiques like theirs probably owed something to metabolic enhancement. The one named Doyle certainly had more than a bit of yellow in the whites of his eyes, which could mean any number of unsavory things. If he had gone through one of the military biomod programs, it meant that even if Sorensen threw a pot of boiling water over him, the bodyguard would still be capable of snapping several necks, pain and third-degree burns notwithstanding.

Oh, man, Ramsey found himself silently begging. Major, please don't do anything stupid.

He was beginning to wonder just what exactly he had let himself into. Yacoubian clearly knew something that scared Sorensen to death—the man's blood had all but drained into his feet when the general started talking about sunglasses—and they were none of them going anywhere without the general's permission. Ramsey was furious that he had not had more time to talk to Sorensen, and had not even met the strange Sellars before this whole thing had blown up; it was like walking unprepared into a capital murder trial, then finding out that you were the one on trial.

His nervous thoughts were interrupted by Christabel scrambling past him toward her father. Sorensen turned and waved her away. "It's hot, Christabel," he said sharply. "I'll bring it to you when it's ready."

Her face screwed up, and her eyes filled. Ramsey looked helplessly to Captain Parkins, who was still glaring down at the blue carpet as though it had done something to offend him, then went and took her hand and led her back to the couch. "It's okay, honey. Come sit with me. Tell me about your school. Who's your teacher?"

Something thumped in the far room. For a moment, Ramsey thought he heard the general's voice raised in anger. The two bodyguards flicked each other a look, then turned back to the game. Ramsey wondered who the general's conference was with, and why it was more important than the interrogation of Sorensen. The general had clearly expended a great deal of energy to track the girl's father: it seemed strange he would keep the matter waiting for half an hour or more. Ramsey looked up at the wallscreen. Closer to an hour. What was this all about?

Something banged the connecting door hard, like someone had taken a sledge to it. Ramsey had only a moment to wonder why such an expensive suite would have doors thin enough to shudder just from someone banging their fist against it in the middle of a phone-conference argument, then Doyle jumped to his feet. He moved across the suite in perhaps two strides, just as frighteningly quick as Ramsey had feared he would be, and stood before the door to the general's room, listening. He knocked twice, loud.

"General? Are you all right?" He flicked a glance back to Pilger, who had risen now too, then knocked again. "General Yacoubian? Do you need some assistance, sir?" He leaned to the door, straining to hear a reply. After a moment, he pounded again, wide hand flat on the door. "General! Open up, sir!"

"What are they doing?" Christabel asked, beginning to cry again. "Why are they shouting. . . ?"

Doyle took a step back, grabbed Pilger's shoulder to brace himself, then lifted his booted foot and slammed it against the door. "Bolted," he grunted. This time they both kicked the door at the same time, which crunched and fell inward. Pilger splintered it off its broken hinges while Doyle snatched the huge machine-pistol from his shoulder holster and stepped through, the weapon already locked in firing position as he disappeared from Ramsey's view.

His voice came from a few meters inside the room. "Shit!"

Pilger stepped through after him, his weapon also drawn. Ramsey waited a moment. When no sounds of firing were heard, he stood and moved cautiously toward the door, trying to get an angle to see what was happening. Captain Parkins was leaning forward in his chair, mouth open.

"Christabel!" Sorensen shouted from somewhere behind him. "Don't get up! You stay on that damned couch!"

Doyle was squatting over the body of General Yacoubian, which lay sprawled on the floor between the door and the suite's large bed, his bathrobe rucked around his legs and open over his white-furred chest. The general's tan skin had turned a strange shade of gray. His tongue dangled from his mouth like a piece of rag. Doyle had begun CPR: for a surreal moment, Ramsey wondered how the bodyguard had pushed hard enough in just a few seconds to make that broad purple welt on the general's breast.

"Ambulance to the garage," Doyle said between his teeth. "This is massive. And get the kit."

Pilger was already hurrying back into the main room, his finger pushing against the jack on his neck. He spat a sequence of code into midair, then suddenly turned and waved his gun across the room. "All of you, lie on the floor. Right now!" Without waiting to see whether his order was obeyed, he kneeled and pulled a black valise out from under the couch, then headed back toward the bedroom. He popped its catches and slid it toward Doyle, who was still working on the general; with each blow, Yacoubian bounced on the carpet. Pilger drew a syringe out of one of the valise's inner pockets. As he checked its label, he saw Ramsey standing in the doorway. The gun came up in his other hand.

"Goddamn it, I said I wanted you all down on the floor!"

"Daddy?" Christabel was crying back in the main part of the suite. "Daddy!"

Even as Catur Ramsey backed away, helplessly watching the frighteningly large hole at the end of Pilger's gun barrel, something flared in the corner of his eye. He flinched, but there was no sound of a shot. He looked to the right and saw something that made no sense at all: Major Michael Sorensen was standing on a chair in the suite's kitchen holding a burning' napkin clutched in a pair of ice tongs. He was lifting it up to the ceiling, like some bizarre parody of the Statue of Liberty with her torch.

"I told you all to lie down!" shouted Pilger, who could not see this inexplicable sight. Even as Doyle plunged the hypodermic into the middle of the dark bruise on Yacoubian's chest, Pilger's gun tracked from one side of the doorway to the other, then tilted down at Ramsey's knees. Something clattered, then hissed.

Suddenly it was snowing purple.

The tiles of the ceiling had folded back like Venetian blinds. Dozens of nozzles racked down, spewing clouds of pale lavender fire-retardant dust. The lights of the room began to flick on and off and a painfully loud buzzing filled the air. Sorensen leaped past Ramsey and snatched his daughter up off the floor, then sprinted toward the elevator door where he began to press the button, over and over.